Day 4025

Today was a fitting end to 2020. The weather was absolutely miserable. There was a heavy all day rain and the temparature was in the mid thirties. It felt even colder with a wind chill in the twenties. Needless to say, Dawn didn't get a walk today. She wouldn't have wanted one anyway. It was hard enought to get her to go out in the back yard and pee. Yesterday and today have broken my Fitbit streak. The only steps I got today were walking back and forth between the office and the kitchen to get more snacks.

It's too bad I don't like watching television. Today was tailor-made for watching movies on Netflix or binge watching a new series on Amazon Prime. Without our long morning walk, the day seemed impossibly long. I looked at Facebook for a while, watched some astronomy videos on YouTube, and kept checking on the pumps to make sure that they weren't clogged. I can turn on the pumps from indoors now, but unfortunately I can't see if water is coming out the hoses. To do that I have to go out in the back yard and look around the side of the house. It still beats climbing up on the roof though.

Eventually I got bored enough to start building the new company website I've been postponing forever.  I deconstructed a few websites I like and examined their code to see how they accomplished all their fancy tricks. Once I figured out how these things worked, I started building something similar myself. I didn't really think I'd make much progress, but I had all day. By dinnertime, I had the outline of a pretty nice site. I'm pretty sure I can finish this over the weekend. I don't really expect the new site to bring me any business.  It's just a way to keep my hand in the game.

I'm not really sure who visits my existing website anymore. There was a time when it was considered somewhat innovative and I remember that it used to bring me business. That's ancient history now. It's literally been decades since one of my sites was nominated for Website of the Year and even longer since another site I designed was included in a Ryder Publications book called The World Wide Web Top 1000. I was a very early adopter and did pretty well designing very simple static sites. When Google decided that websites needed to be mobile friendly to be included in their search results, it was time for me to pack it in and pass the torch to a younger generation. To this day I have never looked at a website on my phone.

New Year's Eve is one more thing that never changed for us during the pandemic. Many years ago my band used to routinely play New Year's Eve parties, but it has been a long, long time since Janet and I have left the house to celebrate. We struggle to stay awake until midnight. We'll have a glass of champagne and eat some cheese and crackers as we watch the ball drop on TV. That's what we'll do tonight if we don't fall asleep watching Perry Mason. 

I hope that 2021 ushers in a return to normalcy, but I have my doubts. Realistically, things will probably get worse for a while. Many people are starting to say that Covid will become like the flu and never really go away. Society has already changed so dramatically that there isn't going to be a return to normal. Whatever was normal a few years ago is gone. Have you seen that Boston Dynamics video with the dancing robots? When robots can dance better than you can, you can probably kiss your jobs goodbye. Companies have already learned to operate with a lot fewer people during the Covid lockdowns. I'm convinced that this trend will continue. All things considered, this is a good time to be retired.

Dot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 4024

It was cold and wet today. Dawn was smart. She quickly went outside and did her business after we woke up and then didn't want to leave the house for the rest of the day. I foolishly thought I could take advantage of a break in the weather and get some steps in. It didn't take long for the rain to start again and I ended up getting wet after I finished my first mile. Janet was smarter. She went to the gym to get her exercise.

Nothing gives you cabin fever like a cold all day rain. I made sure the pumps on the roof were working, but there were very few projects I felt like starting today. After drying my wet clothes, finishing my morning smoothie and wasting as much time as I could on the computer, I eventually became so bored that I decided to go to the grocery store in the rain. I would have waited until tomorrow, but it is supposed to rain all day tomorrow too.

I was surprised at how much traffic there was on this cold dismal day. Were all these other people bored like me or did they actually have important things to do? I got the things I needed and came home again. Of course I had to wash the car because I can't stand a muddy car.

I think the dehumidifier company sent me a factory second. The unit seems to work fine, but it makes a strange rattling noise that sounds like something is loose inside. The other dehumidifiers never made this noise. There is something strange about the mechanism that shuts the unit off when the tank is full as well. It doesn't seem to be connected to anything electrically, so I don't know how it can turn the unit off after the water bucket becomes full. How do I test this thing without flooding the house? For now, I'm just turning it off at night. Better safe than sorry. I hate to complain to the manufacturer because they did give me this thing for free.

I hate the fact that the virus appears to be getting worse even though many states are completely shut down. When is this thing going to end? I'm really hesitant to travel now. It would probably be foolish to go anywhere. So much for following rocket launches for a while. I keep reading that hospitals in Dallas are filling up again, but I still don't know anyone in town who had become sick. It's all very strange. It's easy to become paranoid when you turn on the news. There's always a story about some young, healthy athlete who got the virus and died a few days later. I try to stay safe, but part of me thinks that everyone is going to get this virus eventually.

I've started following a few astrophotography groups on the Internet. It's become pretty apparent that this is all about accumulating as much gear as you can and then trying to figure out how to hook it all together. There is a lot more talk about gadgets on these groups than about objects in the sky. It was pretty much the same when I collected watches or even model trains. Time will tell whether I have the patience to take hundreds of pictures of the same object, call the resulting photographs "data," and then meticulously stack them all together along with dark, flat, and bias frames to produce an image that would be impossible to see with your eye. I love looking at the night sky, but I also like getting a good night's sleep and am not a terribly patient person.

I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. Every forecast I've looked at says there's a 100% chance of rain for most of the day. The best thing about tomorrow is that 2020 will be over. Let's hope that 2021 turns out a little better.

Penny is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day